My sister-in-law was out at our place exactly one year ago, this weekend, with her then new-to-us boyfriend. She’d been dating him a while, but none of us had ever met him. We had a nice family get-together, and all really liked him. Apparently they both liked our place really well, too, because fast forward a year, and you find me readying the house for their little reception, following the intimate, morning wedding ceremony they’ll share out under the trees tomorrow morning.

I love stuff like this; intimate gatherings and important moments. I love to bear witness to someone’s stepping off into a whole, new, great direction, knowing in your bones that it’s right and good. When I get to be a part of the gathering, beyond a spectator, I love it all the more because it’s a personal investment.

I was also honored by being asked to make their cake. This is not anything terribly fancy (again, very small gathering), just a layered carrot cake, which is the groom’s favorite, very simply decorated. I’ve been comparing recipes, and considering the carrot cake quite a bit, as you might imagine. It’s always interesting to me when someone has come up with a recipe combining vegetables and sugar. Was it a bumper crop of carrots that drove a farmer’s wife to get creative, or a desperate young mother trying to get more veggies down her kid? We’ll probably never know. But I do know this: Certainly, whomever she was, she didn’t think about all the millions of people, years and years later, who would still be grating those carrots and making her recipe to the delight of family and friends. She absolutely DID NOT THINK her recipe would have the honor of gracing a wedding table. She simply placed that new creation on her own table as an offering of love.

As I get ready to attack the bag of carrots in my fridge, I’m wondering about how my actions and offerings will play out in future generations. Will they be cherished and passed through future generations like a treasured family recipe, or will they be a hated concoction that everyone will want to purge from their recipe box? Likely some of both, to be honest, but I’m shooting for more in the treasured category. What we leave behind for those coming up – no matter how small, no matter how insignificant – matters.

It MATTERS.

It may just be carrots and sugar, but the end result might just be treasured forever. Even if you never bear witness to all those eating it, you’ll know in your heart that it’s right and good because, after all, it is an offering of love.

“Listen, dear friends, to God’s truth,
    bend your ears to what I tell you.
I’m chewing on the morsel of a proverb;
    I’ll let you in on the sweet old truths,
Stories we heard from our fathers,
    counsel we learned at our mother’s knee.
We’re not keeping this to ourselves,
    we’re passing it along to the next generation—
God’s fame and fortune,
    the marvelous things he has done.” Psalm 78:4 MSG

“One gives freely, yet grows all the richer…” Proverbs 11:24 ESV